Counter dumb money, that's it.

I'm glad that I have taken the opportunity to buy sub $6000 levels last month, it was too tempting to not buy. I am however not selling anything so I technically don't benefit from current increase at all. It's not worth taking marginal profits anymore. I purely focus on large shorts and that's more than enough to build up my Bitcoin stack. I'll let the price go up and short just before the SEC is going to announce an approval or rejection.

The reason I am shorting is that even with an approval you have to deal with buy the rumor sell the news, especially with how the ETF itself won't roll out this year.

That doesn't change the outcome one single bit. The only thing that matters is top to bottom decrease in this case, and they are pretty brutal.

I remember trading Litecoin back in 2013 when suddenly the price tanked with 40% in a matter of minutes after I went all in, lol. That was my first hardcore lesson to never ever go all in again. I wanted to buy so badly, but there was no fiat left to buy with, and you can't wire fiat in an instant to an exchange to benefit from that flash crash.

People complain about corrections and whatnot, but these events turn you into a mentally far stronger trader/investor/holder. In some cases it may be an expensive lesson, but you'll make that money back x10 or x100 later on. See it as in investment in yourself. You can't lose by investing in yourself.

That doesn't say anything. Bots are constantly buying and selling coins, so even if you think people are buying, it's probably just whales trying to outsmart each other.

Just like how the resets to lower levels weren't genuine, the bump up to +$7000 wasn't genuine either. It's nothing more than a game that's being played by whales, and with how thin the market is they can practically do everything with it that they want. The only positive aspect of yesterday's increase is that the volumes picked up, and that is more bullish than the increase itself.

Bitcoin's 24H volume $6.5 billion.
BitMex's 24H volume $5.21 billion.

Let's say that of BitMex's volume $4 billion comes from Bitcoin, then you can say that Bitcoin's volume exceeded $10 billion in the last 24H. Even more if you calculate other secondary market instruments.

Technically it may be that, but it hasn't really done well in that regard in the more recent years. If you tried to use Gold as store of value like 5 years ago, you have done nothing but lose value on top of more value due to the loss in purchasing power. Gold's market is too liquid to be bought up where it outperforms inflation and then you also want to book a virtual gain on top of that. Gold price reached a 1 year low today, which isn't very convincing.

Very interesting (could be pure coincidence) is the fact that Gold took a strong dive before Bitcoin shot up above $7000 yesterday. I didn't follow Gold's movements versus Bitcoin closely before, but will definitely do it now.

Losing faith means these people have put their everything in the market and don't care one single bit about Bitcoin itself. The only thing worthy of faith and trust is Bitcoin itself, the market is shit in all degrees.

It may sound harsh, but if people can't take the stress anymore, they shouldn't be here. This isn't a place for rookies to just dump fiat into Bitcoin and then hope that the price will go up. It's a brutal market where whales are looking to make these people sell their coins to them at the lowest possible price. One of the main reasons we had been in quite a downward spiral lately is because of these rookies, whales want them out before the price goes up again.

The more of these rookies sell at current levels, the more likely it is for them to buy back higher and contribute to a small fomo run.

These players don't enter through the regular exchanges. Exchanges aren't liquid and competent enough.

In the more recent times while people have been complaining about no new money entering, I have been pointing out that money isn't entering through exchanges, but through OTC trades. Even if a larger party ends up buying hundreds of thousands of coins, you won't see exchanges reflect that. Miners have been selling directly to private buyers; they don't even have to dump their mint on the market anymore. Private buyers happily pay premiums for their virgin coins.

That's a pretty noobish way of looking at the market. It may just as well keep tanking after a few days; don't let yesterday's increase trick you into thinking that we are out of the 'danger zone' yet, because we're not. If you look at the charts, you'll see that current increase is the third attempt to break $6900 and it might just as easily fail again. It matters to pay attention to facts and not some nonsense assumptions.

Who's 'we'? Why do you guys always speak in 'we' form instead of just talking about yourselves? I'm not part of what you call 'we'. I see green but I also see a weak market with barely any noteworthy volume increase. It's the same as how things were a week ago, pretty neutral, or as some like to say, bland.

It's purely hype.

There will be a time where crypto will become like what the stock market is today, and that's exactly when we will see a full force shift from centralized to decentralized exchanges.

People right now are too blinded by greed to understand what dangers and risks they expose themselves to on centralized exchanges. Let them nurse their greed as much as they want right now, the market is still relatively free from proper regulations; once regulations form a strong barrier around exchanges people will start to ask themselves why they are allowing themselves to go through all this when they can avoid all that in a decentralized manner.

Dumb money today still uses exchanges. Smart money massively jumped into OTC trades.

This is a field where I think LN will shine. I have been seeing a massive influx of games lately where people can earn small numbers of satoshis while playing, but they can't do anything with them because they need a far larger amount in order to withdraw. If you don't have the main net to worry about, you can send $0.001 payments instantly to anyone after a kill for example, and that thousands of times per second.

I wouldn't even be surprised if the big boys in the game industry will do the same to incentivize people to play and earn, where more often than not people will spend their earnings to buy in-game items, so mostly everything will flow back in the pockets of the game creators again.

These little developments make me happy.

It's quite possible that every government will start doing that.

If we ignore all the circus going on in the media, governments just hate each other, period. They however love doing business with countries as long as it is beneficial for themselves, but how can you trust a transfer of value between one country's financial system and the other? They at any time can rig the shit out of each other, but that's practically impossible with Bitcoin. It creates a trusted layer where value swaps algorithmically will be secured and transferred between the involved parties.

There is no face behind Bitcoin; who will you extort or whatever to force them to fork? This is no Ethereum where Vitalik openly admits to fork if he's forced to do so.

We are basically in the very early stage already with atomic swaps. I strongly believe that this will gain an incredible amount of momentum in the forthcoming years.

Bitcoin's decentralized consensus is the most powerful aspect of it. No other coin has it or will it ever have.

Agreed. People tend to get excited easily when they see their charts develop green dildos.

That's how it all starts.

As soon as these large players announce that they are ready for it, you can be sure of the fact that they have bought in big. Current 'observation' means very likely accumulation time. They are the largest player in the game they play, they know how to deal with every market in the most profitable way, and they will boost the market later on to make sure you know they are on board. They don't hype up something they haven't bought in themselves.

No kidding, Sherlock.

The big boys have taken 3-way profits by selling the spot market down, shorting the crap out of it through futures, and shorting the crap out of it through BitMex.

Fundamentally speaking, whales aren't really selling their coins, they just dump their coins in their own buy orders on the way down. By the time they dumped the price to the bottom they have more coins, more fiat, and a lower price to accumulate even more coins at. That's the good life. All the noobs here are nothing more than a bunch of flies to them. What happens with flies when they become annoying? They get squashed. That's exactly what happened with weak hands and other get rich quick noobs.

A very wise man once said; Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.

Good thing of this shit show is that it yet again proves that the Tether $ peg is as worthless as the dirt under your shoes. 1USDT is currently worth $1.84 on WEX which is down from a peak of nearly $2.30 yesterday.

On the other hand, this situation could also be a smart way for WEX to make people buy their coins at higher prices where it then tanks the market down by enabling withdrawals again. They are shady, it definitely wouldn't surprise me if they actually take advantage of it like that. If people manage to withdraw again and still use that exchange after this nonsense, you are begging to lose your funds.

It depends. If you directly transact with the party you have an open channel with, transactions are practically free. If you however hop your transaction through multiple nodes, fees may still apply. The only difference is that the lightning fees are waaaay lower than on-chain fees, so even if you end up paying a fee, it will be 10-100 times less than what you pay on-chain. Maybe even lower if the market effect kicks in, because you can ignore certain 'expensive' nodes to find a cheaper route.

Altcoins with no fees = altcoins with no network activity.

If Binance ends up going down at whatever point, it won't be because of a rival exchange, but because of its own incompetence or regulative forces.

It's pretty childish to constantly call things killer this or that. Seriously, how old is everyone? Is it that difficult to understand that more competition is only making this industry stronger and more healthy overall? Robinhood was claimed to be a Coinbase killer, which is just as ridiculous. Exchange centralization is never a good thing, we have experienced that with MtGox. Binance needs to shrink, so at best I hope that TradeIO will eat through some of its market share.

Support less centralization, not destruction.

If one ETF gets approved, prepare for a shitstorm of ETF's that will be approved in the coming 6-12 months.

By design all these Bitcoin ETF shares are backed by the underlying asset, which means that if we have a couple of them swallow institutional capital, the market's pool of circulating coins will be empty before we see the block halving kick in.

The main difference with features is that features have an unlimited supply. In other words, you can long or short 1 billion BTC as long as you have the cash to settle these contracts. With a Bitcoin ETF there can't be more shares in existence than there is actual Bitcoin supply. It's a scarce product, and everyone loves scarcity, and everyone is willing to pay for scarcity.

If that's your way of trying to attract them, then you have failed miserably. Miners, especially the larger ones, aren't interested in a fair price, they want the absolute bottom of the bottom. If on top of that you have to deal with a local government not shy of showering you in legal shit, you don't even want to consider their offer as miner. Miners lobbying for the best possible seats is a real thing. Bitmain isn't shy of that, and so are there a few other miners. New York? Skip. There are way better alternatives.

Mining is marching towards Scandinavian countries, which has a great climate for miners, renewable energy, and where the governments there are way more open minded, and more importantly, stable. Good development.

I like these initiatives, especially with how people here mostly take for granted that adoption will grow out itself by not doing anything to stimulate it. That's exactly why we have so many get rich quick assholes here.

I can happily say that I have done my best to make Bitcoin function as a currency within the circle I'm frequently doing business with. They don't necessarily hold all their coins, but they acknowledge the power of a currency that can't be blocked or censored by any shitty bank or government. That's 100 times better than having them use it as speculative shittool. Financial freedom is worth way more than lousy fiat profits, not everyone realizes that yet.

Ideals and improving crypto (Bitcoin more specifically) was only a thing in 2011 and before that.

Everything changed with how crypto in general became more mainstream and thus financially more lucrative to exploit this ecosystem for most involved parties. The entire crypto ecosystem is one big mess and I dislike it to the core. If someone comes up to me and asks whether or not it's a good time to invest in crypto, I advise that person to not invest at all. Stay away. If you aren't capable of doing basic level research yourself you shouldn't be here, period.

I somewhat miss the early days here, where you could endlessly talk about what would happen if this or that bank would hop on board, what would happen if Litecoin was added to MtGox, which we thought would sky rocket the price to $50, etc. Everything we were hoping for and were afraid of to happen, is happening right now.

If you look at things from that perspective you won't ever be able to transact anymore.

The main thing is that you should calculate and research your risks thoroughly. You won't ever obtain 100% anonymity, but you can obtain 90-95% of it. You have to hope that the party that accounts for that 5-10% isn't going to snitch on you in any way, and if they do, you should make sure they can't directly link that transaction to you. Buying Bitcoin with cash from a complete stranger is probably a 10% privacy risk.

In the end there is one great way to transact near anonymously, which is to exchange private keys where nothing ever happens on-chain. It highly depends on trust, but it gets the job done in the most convenient way. Casascius coins are like a brick of Gold; you can exchange them with anyone having enough trust to accept them, and no one but you and the other party knows that value got exchanged. No on-chain trail is like nothing has ever happened, and you can use them as money without internet or electronic device.